Endless capital requests for additional storage resources are the bane of existence for many storage directors and infrastructure VPs. The seemingly unquenchable demand for more space, combined with the nagging feeling that existing space is not being used, has triggered many an internal project aimed at examining storage utilization issues.

All too often, these projects attempt to chase the metric of filelevel utilization. Yet unfortunately, this may not be the right approach to solving utilization problems. Especially for large, complex storage environments, attempting to track file utilization on a global basis may be doomed to failure.

This white paper proposes a more effective approach to solving the storage infrastructure utilization challenge in complex SANs.